My mom attributes everything she doesn’t want to deal with as “going through a phase.”
At the age of 44, apparently I’m just “going through an atheism phase.” The fact that I’ve pretty much been this way since confirmation classes, well…we just don’t need to think about that.
Until I was 6 or 7 years old, I’d never even heard of God, and was completely without theism or the concept of theism.
Until I was around 13, I didn’t believe in God, but I hadn’t closed my mind to the possibility that he existed. I was without belief but prepared to believe.
Until I was around 18, I periodically tried to feel belief in God because the payoff (eternal life and being reunited with my grandparents) was so attractive that I wanted in… But it was lipservice, with no actual belief behind it.
Yet by the definition above, I couldn’t call myself an atheist until I was 18 or 19 and finally admitted that the whole religion thing seemed stupid and unlikely, that God seemed entirely fictitious to me, and I accepted the visible, natural world as the only reality.
I am comfortable describing myself as a lifelong atheist because there has never been a time when I believed in a god. Defining it as the point when I realised faith was never going to make sense to me, and thereby rejected it, seems arbitrary. An atheist need only lack belief in God/s, they don’t need to have rejected religious teachings - and I lacked belief from my earliest childhood.
First an aside. I really can’t personally distinguish between agnostic and atheist. It seems fine to be a deist if you simply believe in god. But some people won’t let you be an atheist unless you can claim you are absolutely positively sure there is no god. Believing there is no god seems to be insufficient for them. I can’t meet that standard. I believe there is no god, and I’m pretty damn sure there is no god like the one I was brought up to believe in.
My family was pretty religious, my mother more so than my father. I was raised Presbyterian, though my father had doubts about many of the more wooo concepts and tried Unitarianism for a while. By that time I was in college and an agnostic or an atheist depending on your definition.
Around age 10 I started reading things about scientific explanations for miracles in the Bible. Things like the star of Bethlehem was a conjunction of planets or a comet or parting of the Red Sea was caused by an earthquake. I read “The Missing Books of the Bible”. (I also read a bunch of other stuff like Velilovsky and later von Daniken.) I really had no guide for what was good stuff and what was pretty stupid. I guess I was trying to reconcile my mother and grandparents beliefs with my own which was much more logic/science based. This continued through my teens I guess before I could say I was really an atheist.
Wow, better not show her Harry Potter. Obviously she’s not aware that C.S. Lewis was actually a Christian and the Narnia series is basically a Christian allegory.
I went to an evangelical Pentecostal school for a few years (it was exactly like the movie Saved!). We had a teacher like that who showed us The Secret Garden in English once. There was a bit where they were dancing round the garden chanting spells or something. She prompted turned the video off because it was obviously promoting witchcraft. :rolleyes:
My mother is also of the camp who claims atheists really do believe in God, they’re just angry at him. :dubious:
My 86 year old, very proper English mother mentioned religion the other day for the first time in my memory. She was commenting on a friend of hers who is a hard core believer.
"She’s a lovely woman but does insist on mentioning Jesus all the time. I’m sure it’s very comforting to be a believer but it just seems so silly to believe in such nonsense’.
Love my mum.
Most of my family is apathetic to religion, so my atheism is probably due to the fact that I was not indoctrinated as a child.
When a coworker found out a few years ago, she leapt up and shouted “Oh, my God! What happened to you?!” as though there were some event to cause it. All I could say was “Nothing happened.” (Which I found amusing, but I guess I was the only one).
I’ve heard this coworker and her overtly religious friends discussing another ‘out’ atheist at work and she is quite convinced that something, and most likely a bad mother, is the root cause of this coworkers non-theism.
I guess it is common to think ‘something bad must have happened.’
There is a better word for what you are saying, but it also isn’t perfect when discussing infants and children. Ignosticism. It is when you lack enough knowledge to define an object. Or a god.
Summary
Agnostic: Undecided on what you believe.
Ignostic: Undecided on what is being talked about.
My family would be more concerned if I suddenly became a theist (of whatever variety), god bless them them. 
We have very strong atheist roots.
For me, my interest has been more of why people believe in weird things, whether it’s religion, psychic phenomenon, water dowsers, conspiracy theorists, etc. I’m kind of interested in how they got that way, although my interest in them has kind of waned as I’ve gotten older.
In which I find really nice, but occasionally like to see some hapless religious folk stroll onto the boards, without realizing this, and then see the poor sap be flayed alive for thinking his proselytizing was going to be welcome here.
This is pretty much my family.
Mom was pretty open about being an atheist, and in her case it did start with a “mad at god” post-rape fury. For the rest of us, the parents exposed us to religion but didn’t push anything. Well, by me that’s what they were doing, my two oldest sisters were sent to Hebrew school early in life to appease the in-laws (dad’s side is Jewish, if it’s not obvious) which totally didn’t work because we were never going to be Jewish enough in their eyes. And mom’s side (Catholic) insisted we were Jews no matter what else we did or didn’t believe or do.
That kind of BS really did nothing to make religion appeal to me.
Contrary to what you’d suspect from the media, there’s a fair number of Americans for whom that is also true. And the numbers are growing, much to the chagrin of the religious camp.
I can’t say I’m atheist, I’m actually a Neo-Pagan, but I get similar questions/responses: Why are you angry at God? What made you that? Why don’t you believe in Jesus? Why did you reject your baptism (these folks sometimes find it inconceivable some folks aren’t baptized)? How can you believe that nonsense? (back at ya) Why do you reject the church? (I was never in a church to begin with) So I don’t get it from my family, but from some of the people around me. They just can’t grasp that “Christian” isn’t the default for everyone.
“You’re so smart, why don’t you believe in Jesus?” :rolleyes:
I currently have a born-again boss for whom I am a constant puzzle. She asked me flat out once why I didn’t consider myself a Christian. Not wanting a theological debate with my employer, I simply stated “I don’t believe Jesus is either god or the son of god” which she finds very hard to wrap her mind around, but she concedes that that is a requirement for being Christian. She just doesn’t understand why it isn’t obvious to me that Jesus is G/SoG.
I confess I do tend to subconsciously label all my USA friends and colleagues as religious. That being the case I’d probably never bring up the subject of religion at all, therefore probably not giving an opening for the unbelievers to voice their position. Therefore through politeness and conflict-avoidance I am contributing to the problem.
Born in Chicago in 1960 and raised in an RC household. Can’t remember a time at which so much of church didn’t impress me as pretty silly. Was never in “awe”, even as a little kid. Remember thinking the little candle in the corner signifying “God is in the house” especially silly.
I do remember a switch in my head flipping during catechism classes (back then they let us out of public schools on Wednesday afternoons to attend them.) I think it was around 5th grade, and it just struck me as so ridiculous to say that the worst Catholic would go to heaven so long as he said “I’m sorry, I believe” on his deathbed, whereas the most moral Buddhist/Muslim/Hindu etc. would be denied heaven.
As a kid another big impression resulted from the changing of the rules. Wait, now we CAN eat meat on Fridays? There’s no more limbo? And confession always seemed a silly exercise. Didn’t see a reason to believe in the “magical” aspects of confession, communion, and the like.
No major changes in my life occurred at that time - no deaths, births, health crises… And my parents remained RC til their deaths (my mom more strictly observant than my dad) and my 3 sisters remain RC to this day. So I’m pretty confident that I reached my decision intellectualy and on my own.
Never really talked much with my family about it, tho I never hid anything. I respect their practices because I love them. I remember one time in my early 20s when my mom asked if I really didn’t believe in any God, and when I said I didn’t, she said that made her sad. I suspect she baptized our kids in the kitchen sink. My dad had a couple of medical emergencies - said it was much more appealing to believe in a God to pray to while in ICU, but said the feeling passed pretty quickly when he improved. Just don’t discuss it with my sisters and their families. It appears as tho their kids are either very casual in their beiefs or lack faith - which disturbs my sisters to varying degrees. And I don’t understand how my sisters - who impress me as otherwise quite intelligent - can maintain an allegiance to an organization that seems so corrupt. But resolving this difference is not worth endangering the very good family relations we enjoy.
We did have a religious fallout with one of my wife’s sisters. She asked us to go to their Lutheran church’s Easter services, and then to dinner. The service really disgusted us - had ZERO to say about how to live one’s life, and instead discounted our current existence in the hopes of an afterlife. Afterwards, at dinner, my SIL kept asking what we thought of the service. We kept saying banalities like, “the music was nice”, “the church was beautiful” … But when she kept at it, I asked why God needed to be praised? Why wouldn’t he prefer that all of those people go out and do some good instead of sitting in that fancy building. Believe it or not, I meant it as a sincere question, with no intention of offending. She got REALLY pissed at me for having asked such an offensive question, especially in front of her teenage son. Might have been the nail that ended our spending holidays together - which was a good thing from my perspective.
I really don’t understand how people can accept that their personal belief is correct, and huge numbers of other peoples’ beliefs are simply wrong. My mind just doesn’t work that way. And once I accepted that there was no rational basis for a particular belief, and no real need for that (or any other) belief system to explain the universe, then the reasons for not believing just keep piling up on top of each other.
I don’t understand this either. I keep seeing people on the news wondering whether the new pope will be more liberal, and I’m wondering, just who makes the rules?
There was no one event that did it. I was raised Catholic, and really believed while I was a kid. It started to fade after a while, and I didnt know why. The whole thing looked kinda weird, and not what it said it was. I saw people who thought of themselves as good Christians being complete assholes, all the little rules that didn’t seem to have a purpose other than to make people obedient, etc. I eventually just stopped going to church, but didn’t really know what else to do.
I had never encountered other religions growing up, so college was an eye opener. It never even occurred to me that atheism was an option, much less Wicca or Sikhism. I started trying out religions, going with friends, watching, reading up on them, and eventually decided that none of them felt right. That was when I realized I was an atheist.
My mother still bugs me about it, she doesn’t know where I went wrong, why do I reject what she taught me, etc. It’s annoying. She’s asked me if D&D made an atheist, if it was some professor at college, and a few other odd questions that originated in something she heard from someone.
i knew my my Dad was never religious, but my Mom and Mom’s family are fundies. My Dad skipped church, but never once said if he believed in god or not. It was only after he died, my mother told me he was an atheist. It’s too bad I only found out then, I’d been atheist my entire teen and adult life, and sometimes my Dad and I didn’t get along too well. Perhaps that might have helped.
What I heard frequently about my Dad was that he was “too smart for his own good” which is what made him atheist/non-religious. As I doubt I need to explain, those were of course more nails in the coffin of my theism.
I was brought up in an intellectual RC household but for me atheism always seemed as natural as breathing. This has never been a serious source of conflict with my family. For them, God is obvious. For me, No God is obvious. They are positions on equal footing.
Arguments about what “leads” ones to atheism are inherently flawed by the unstated assumption that Belief is the baseline that atheists diverge from. For me, and I suspect for most atheists, Belief is simply one of many human arts anthropomorphizing nature to remove its distance or unpredictability. Everybody has the experience of rejecting *some *of these arts. So, you wouldn’t ask somebody why they aren’t superstitious, so why ask us why we are atheists? For us, it is the same thing. For a Believer, of course, it’s completely different.
As for apologists then attempting to patiently explain how religion and superstition are different, I can see why they would want to, either out of sincere concern for truth or nervous defense of their assumptions. However, once you for example read Coplestoncover-to-cover you’re not going to be swayed by any street arguments for divinity - you’ve already absorbed the most inspired arguments ever written. To appreciate these as a delightful, positive human art form like a sonnet or a play, while still understanding them as human made, is I think where both Belief and atheism are refined into something well above both that we can all participate in.
Ah, the dreaded outside influence. My grandmother was good for that one about everything. “You don’t like what we’re having for dinner - who told you you don’t like lima beans? C’mon, you’re not coming up with this stuff on your own!”*
True story - she insisted to her dying day my sister actually liked lima beans, and was just trying to look cool saying she doesn’t. That’s how you fit in with the cool kids - your choice of legumes.
Arbitrary-seeming definitions arise as a routine, and unavoidable, artifact of language growth. Perhaps atheism should mean “lack of belief” but if everyone else meant “lack of belief except on Tuesday, on which day it means typewriter ribbon”, then I’d have to go along with it or risk being misunderstood. In fact, “atheism” has the real misfortune to mean several mutually contradictory things depending on who uses the term: lack of belief in gods; explicit disbelief in gods; even, in some cases, a generally rational or non-superstitious outlook. Individuals on all sides of the religion debate like to score rhetorical points by pretending that their terminology is the only one in play, so I don’t see the situation changing any time soon.
In your case, calling yourself a “lifelong atheist” seems to carry only minimal risk of being misunderstood, so if you feel like that phrase gets the job done then I won’t argue with you. But enough people mean something different by “atheist” that you should be prepared to enter the Argument of Definitions again at some point.
I guess I’m really lucky in that we don’t really discuss religion in my family at all. They all accept me as atheist without question. Except my father. He questions his pastor all the time. I suspect that he’s one little nudge from becoming an atheist.
It happened for me when I watched the movie Ghost.